


venus, planet of love (was destroyed by global warming)

by lady_ragnell



Category: Still Star-Crossed (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Astronauts, Banter, F/M, Survival, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-23
Updated: 2019-12-23
Packaged: 2021-02-26 16:14:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21921067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_ragnell/pseuds/lady_ragnell
Summary: Rosaline is the commander of the first manned mission to Venus, which unfortunately means that she's spending a few hundred days with only a Montague for company. She's counting every day of it.
Relationships: Rosaline Capulet/Benvolio Montague
Comments: 26
Kudos: 87
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	venus, planet of love (was destroyed by global warming)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jediseagull](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jediseagull/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! The title is, of course, from Mitski's "Nobody."

“Why, Capulet, you almost look like you're not thrilled to be spending the next hundred and three days in my company.”

Rosaline takes a deep, annoyed breath before she turns her head to stare across the cockpit at Benvolio Montague, who's grinning at her. She's discovered, during the short amount of training they had time to do together, that the more annoyed she is, the more he smiles. His face is going to hurt by the end of this mission. She doesn't feel much preemptive sympathy, since her head already hurts. “You do understand that we're on NASA property and anything we say right now, minutes before our launch, could well be a matter of public record, right?”

“I can grasp that, yes. It's not rocket science.”

He's still grinning, and she's thinking about murder. Most astronaut candidates she's met get their rocket science jokes out of the way early, but no, apparently Benvolio Montague, most immature man she's ever met and her mission partner for the first manned mission to Venus, still thinks they're clever. That's wonderful. She hits the button to put them in contact with mission control. “Mission control, were you recording that?”

“We're recording everything, Verona,” says Escalus, already sounding weary. Like sending Montague on her mission wasn't his idea. “For now, at least.”

“I was just remarking that Capulet seems overjoyed about this mission what's wrong with that?” Montague asks, grin still on his face.

Rosaline sighs. Her clock is showing twenty minutes to launch, and she's got some checks to do very soon. “How many days was that again? A hundred and three? That's only half the mission. We also have to get back from Venus.”

“Ah, yes, but I fully expect you to murder me upon arrival and pitch me into the clouds to meet my acid-etched end.”

She snorts. “Can't pollute a whole planet like that, whether I want to or not.”

Benvolio's grin stops being shit-eating and starts being pleased, like he likes that she's joining in on his game, even though she's half-serious. On the radio, Escalus sighs. “Public record,” he says.

A hundred and three days, and that's just half the mission. But Rosaline really shouldn't be counting the days, much less calculating the hours, for something she's always wanted to do. She'll just find a way to ignore Montague in the very small amount of space they have.

*

Rosaline starts crying when they break orbit, when they're flung out into the void of space, traveling towards the sun, only a few months from views no one else has seen in person. She can't help it. Space has been her dream, Venus has been her dream, for so long. She's supposed to be doing this with Juliet, but Juliet is on Earth with pins in her leg after a training accident and now she has to make the best of it.

“Are you crying?” Montague asks next to her, sounding horrified.

“Just thinking about Juliet. She would love this.”

To her surprise, Montague nods. “Romeo too.”

The space agency's golden pair, all the more beloved by the public with all the fighting their fathers did in Congress, and then a fight in Congress led to a public training exercise, and that led in turn to this, Juliet and Romeo pulled from their missions, Montague taken off the ISS plans and shuffled to the _Verona_ project with haste by Escalus, partly to show the public their families were still making nice and partly because he'd at least done some study on exo-meteorology to make up for the science Juliet was supposed to do on the mission.

“Wasn't Mars his goal?” she asks, because she can't sustain a horrible mood for upwards of six months if she wants her blood pressure to stay healthy.

“I feel like there's some kind of very outdated 'Men are from Mars' joke I could make here, but yeah.”

“And you?”

Benvolio nods out the window. They're not facing Earth. They're not facing anything, not right now. Nothing they recognize. “I just wanted to get up here.”

She wants to scorn that, the way everything else about him is so easy to scorn, but she can't blame him for that. She knows the light in his eyes, the ones the true astronauts have. However annoying he is, he's like her in that way, at least. “I can understand that,” she says, and they sit there and watch space around them until the radio comes to life and Escalus gives them their first instructions.

*

“If you keep fucking humming while I am doing my calculations, I am going to rip your tongue out.”

“Five days,” Montague immediately says.

That brings Rosaline up short. “Five days what?”

“That's how long it took for you to threaten violence against me with words and not just your eyes. I'm honestly surprised you've lasted this long.”

“He's joking,” Rosaline says, for the sake of the audio. They're not being actively recorded at all times, but if there's an incident on the ship, nearly everything will be recorded to make investigation easier. If there aren't incidents, their audio will be classified for ninety-nine years so it's history and not an embarrassment.

“Rosaline Capulet, first murderer in space.”

“Only if you don't stop humming.”

To her surprise, he beams at her, and it seems at least some kind of honest. “I'll get you singing along by the end of this mission, captain, I swear.”

Rosaline rolls her eyes, but she knows there's a smile twitching at the corners of her mouth. “Only if you learn to carry enough of a tune that I can tell what you're trying to sing.”

The next day, in the daily video Escalus makes them record for the children of earth, claiming that they're the most popular crew up in space right now and that even if they weren't people need to see them working together, Montague starts singing, and it's so bad she does feel the need to chime in and guide him onto the right tune, and he's so smug afterwards that she declines to speak to him for a full day.

*

“He can't possibly be that bad,” Livia says in a video chat on day twenty. They're far enough from Earth that chats are starting to be a little laggy, but Rosaline wanted to talk to her sister, and Livia is being very patient about it.

“Can't he? He's a Montague!”

“And you are playing into stereotypes. I'm going to call Juliet and she'll make a disappointed face at you. Do you want me to do that?”

Juliet, who has thrown herself into erasing their family rivalry, probably mostly so her eventual wedding isn't horribly awkward, is really good at looking disappointed. Rosaline sighs. “No, I don't. Fine, he's terrible totally independent of being a Montague. Does that make you happy?”

Livia just laughs at her. “Can't you try to find something to like about him? Maybe you share taste in gum flavors, or he laughs at your genuinely terrible jokes, or something.”

“Absolutely nothing,” Rosaline says, though she knows even as she says it it's a lie. When they were discussing file storage for their mission, so they wouldn't bring doubles of music or books or anything else to make room for more, there was a decent amount of overlap. They just always listen to the music on headsets and don't discuss the books or the few movies they could fit. Considering they have to survive the next several months with only each other for company, maybe she should be the bigger person and reach out.

“There, see?” says Livia, and on Earth Rosaline wouldn't let her smug look stand, but up in space, that doesn't seem to matter too much. They're so far apart. Livia can look smug if she wants. “Just capitalize on that, and by the time you come back you'll be best friends.”

Rosaline snorts. “I doubt it.”

*

They do share a love of memoirs, for totally different reasons, but at least it gives them something to talk about.

*

“I thought I told you that I'd murder you if you kept humming when I'm trying to nap, which is quite generous since I let you hum at other times now,” Rosaline says on day forty-eight, coming out of her bunk in a terrible mood after his hums seemed to penetrate all the way into her restless attempts at sleep, tuneless and deeply irritating.

Benvolio frowns at her. “I wasn't humming.”

She rolls her eyes. “Sometimes you do it without thinking, but you really do need to think, because it's very annoying, and—”

“No, seriously, Cap. I wasn't. I was in my bunk, very quietly having an extremely laggy conversation with Romeo.” He looks serious enough that she has to believe him, suddenly worried, and Rosaline's last bit of lethargy from her nap vaporizes with her own worry. “If you were hearing humming, it wasn't me.”

“What was it, then?”

“Search me. Maybe you're hallucinating my dulcet tones?” he asks, but his heart isn't in it.

“Maybe,” she says, but they're both unsettled for the rest of the day.

*

“It's the ship,” Rosaline says on day fifty-two, interrupting Benvolio's game of computer chess, which he is losing at very badly.

“What's the ship?”

“The humming I've been hearing. I went down to the engine room, and something about the harmonics is off.” She takes a deep breath. “I think something's strange with one of the engines.”

He freezes, then turns slowly around. His eyes are wide with panic. “How sure are you? I mean, changes in harmonics sound like so much nonsense, I'll be honest with you, but you're also not the kind of person to panic over stupid shit.”

For once, she's not offended about him second-guessing her. In his position, she would really want him to be wrong. “Pretty sure. We need to talk to mission control.”

“Right you are, Cap.”

He's taken to calling her that, and she's never sure if it's short for “Capulet” or “captain” and suspects that the real point is that he knows she doesn't know and likes to tease her. Right now, though, it sounds serious. They may not like each other much, but that can't survive a problem with the ship when they're nearly two hundred million kilometers from home. “We'll get this sorted out,” she says, as authoritative as she can, and pushes herself forward to call home.

*

Mission control isn't getting any problems, so Rosaline, annoyed with herself and them both, goes to the engine room and spends most of the next two days there, when she isn't sleeping, eating, or filming her damn mandatory videos.

On the third day, Benvolio shows up. “Any idea what's up, Cap?”

“I think there's a loose screw, which could be completely fine and could kill us, depending on a lot of factors,” she says, frowning at the area she's narrowed the problem down to.

“Can I help?” Rosaline twists to face him, surprised, and he shrugs. “I've only got as much mechanics' knowledge as any astronaut has to, but I really cannot do science readings while you are down here in the bowels of the ship trying to keep us from dying. I will hold your wrenches or whatever.”

After a moment, she nods. “Come on over here, I'll tell you what I think is happening and we'll get it fixed.”

Fixing a spaceship while it's in space is terrifying, fiddly, slow work, even from the inside. Before they open up the panel, they suit up in case of catastrophe, seal off the engine room from the rest of the ship, and let mission control know what they're doing, before abandoning their communications array before they can get orders confirming or countermanding their plan.

It's a best case scenario for a problem, though: a tiny bolt rattling around in the part of the electrical system that talks to the thrusters. Rosaline triple-checks every wire, making sure none of them got shorted out or otherwise damaged, and when they're all re-secured and the bolt is put back where it seems to have come from, the _Verona_ seems to purr again, no disorienting humming, just the ship she knows and loves.

They get back to a series of stern messages from mission control, and when Rosaline goes to her personal terminal she has a message from Escalus saying _Please tell me you're okay_. Normally, that might make her heart flutter, but she sends him a quick confirmation, sums up the incident for mission control, and accedes to Benvolio's wishes for a party instead of writing him a longer message.

The party is just having their day's rations with music playing and breaking into their ration of ice cream, but she'll take it.

*

Day seventy-nine brings a minor, routine course correction. The scientists and engineers on earth can calculate exact launch angles all day long, but going to another planet is shooting an arrow in the dark, and they've had a flight plan change come through, to align them more closely with Venus, as they get so close, Earth receding behind them, Venus starting to loom a little larger.

Rosaline puts in the string of code, plots out the course correction that should get them moving, and keys it in while Benvolio lounges next to her, losing at chess again and occasionally inserting commentary on how serious she is about her job. She snipes back occasionally about how at least one of them has to be, even though she's seen him poring over journal articles about all the weather behavior he's going to be observing on Venus.

About five minutes after the code input, she should start feeling something, and hearing the thrusters come on, but there's only silence. She waits a few minutes more, and a few minutes after that, and only considers that she might be frozen when Benvolio, frowning at the board he somehow still thinks he can salvage, says “All set, then? Not being flung into the uncaring void of space, followed by a quick death by roasting or melting?”

“The computer says the thrusters are coming online, but they are not,” says Rosaline. “We should have been able to feel something, the vibrations changing.”

“You have a weirdly close relationship to this ship, Capulet, we're probably fine.”

“We are not.” She pushes herself out of her chair. “Come on. If you're right, worst thing that happens is getting out of your chair to stretch, and I know you haven't had your daily exercise yet.”

Benvolio complains the whole way through the ship that she's overreacting, but he shuts up when they get down there and it's obvious that the thrusters are peacefully doing absolutely nothing at all. “So, scale of one to ten, how bad is this?” he asks, and for once, there's nothing like a joke in his tone.

“Depends what's causing it.” Rosaline takes a deep breath, thinks about the repairs they had to do just a few weeks ago. “We might have just put that bolt back in the wrong place, or missed that some wires were shorted out, the bolt could have caused a larger problem we couldn't see at the time, or it's unrelated and we're going to have to diagnose it from scratch. I'm going to explore, you're going to ask mission control for advice.”

“You're the captain, isn't that your job?”

“This ship is my job. You can get through, there will be a lag, but they're probably already sending us messages asking why we're not moving on their radars. Tell them there's a malfunction and the computer says the thrusters are on but they're not, and that I'm trying to see what's going on. Ask for orders.”

“Right. Yes.” He turns and then stops. “How long, realistically, do we have to fix this?”

“The longer it takes the bigger our correction has to be, and the harder it's going to be. So, sooner is better. Go.”

Benvolio lingers for another few seconds, biting his lip, and she wonders if he's going to argue, or ask another question, but he just shakes his head and leaves, and Rosaline decides to trust him to do what needs to be done and turns her attention to whatever is wrong with her ship.

Terrifyingly, the answer seems to be “nothing.” Wires are all still in place, the bolt they put in is still secure and nowhere seems to be loose to indicate that the bolt was put back wrong—even NASA said, after her explanation, that the schematics had a bolt there. The side thrusters just aren't communicating with the control panel in the cockpit.

“They're running diagnostics, Cap,” Benvolio shouts across the ship after a while, barely audible with the hum of the engines all around her. “Full systems check in the meantime.”

Right. Probably smarter than rooting around fruitlessly in the wiring, which is a great way to die. Rosaline closes everything up tight and goes back to the cockpit to do what she probably would have done if she weren't panicking.

Benvolio is pretty obviously panicking too, wide-eyed as instructions and concern scroll across their screen, mission control forgoing the comforting crackle of lagging voices on an intercom for orders that can't be misinterpreted or misheard. “Systems check, Montague,” she says. “Takes both of us. We can't do anything else until we know what's working and what's not. We're just a few days early for the scheduled one anyway.”

“This mission is cursed and I blame our uncles,” he says, starting down the boring weekly routine with his hands shaking.

They don't have time, but two minutes isn't going to make or break them, at this point. Rosaline puts her hand on his arm. “Hey. Benvolio. We are good at this.”

“You are good at this, I am not, I knew a two-man mission was a bad idea.”

For once, she deliberately snaps at him instead of letting him bait her into it. “Shut up, I'm paying you a compliment, the least you could do is listen to me.” That does the job, as she'd hoped it would. “I know that your specialties are the science more than the engineering, but you also told me like eighteen different stories about rigging up various objects in your home to shock people, make noises, or otherwise annoy your cousin and your uncle and any other relatives who happened to be around. That kind of improvisatory engineering is what we need right now.”

“Right. Okay.” Benvolio turns back to the controls, hitting his first switches for the systems check. “I didn't know you were listening, when I was running on about all of that.”

“Of course I was,” says Rosaline, and is a little surprised by how much she means it.

There's a beat of silence, and they spring into action at once, starting their check, watching the scroll of mission control running their own diagnostics, fixing the problem that really should have all of Rosaline's attention, and not just ninety-nine percent of it.

*

The good news is that they find the short. The bad news is fairly bad, though.

“I really can do it,” says Benvolio, but Rosaline is already halfway into her EVA suit, and they both know he can't anyway, all her talk about improvised engineering aside.

“Moot point,” says Rosaline, mechanically going through the actions, triple-checking everything, while Benvolio watches. It's been eight hours since the thrusters didn't turn on, her sleep cycle was supposed to start two hours ago, and sometime soon, when this is fixed, she's going to curl up in her bunk and have a very quiet panic attack about all of this. Right now, though, Benvolio looks so terrified that she can't show her own terror. “I'm the commander of this mission, and I've assigned myself the task.”

“You know I love it when you get all hot and captainly, but seriously, Cap, this goes wrong, I do not have the know-how to get home or do another try.”

She sighs and stops what she's doing. “Mission control will walk you through, but that is unnecessary pessimism. You've got to walk me through this. Are you going to be okay with that?”

“I kind of have to be.”

That's as good an answer as she's going to get, so Rosaline finishes suiting up in tense silence, gets her tools, and goes to the airlock. “We can do this,” she says. “Run to the cockpit as soon as I'm out, get in my ear, we'll figure it out.”

“I know it's bad because you're being all comforting and shit,” he says, but he obeys, and puts her in the airlock, lets her set up her tether and her magnets, everything that will keep her from flying off the ship.

She's done an EVA or two in her time—practice for a two-man mission requires them in Earth orbit, and in the month she spent on the ISS, she got her chance. This is, though, her first one alone, and when the airlock door opens and she floats out into the void, she's sharply reminded how alone she is, how alone they are, all the way out here.

But it's as beautiful as it is terrifying. Rosaline has always loved looking at the stars, and here they are, beautiful and so close. If she turns right, she'll be able to see the sun, so bright and hot even at this distance that they're starting to have to shade the windows in the cockpit when the sun is in their viewports. She and Benvolio are seeing things no one else has seen, not this way, not from this angle.

“Here I am,” Benvolio says in her ear, startling her a little. “Let's get to work, shall we?”

“Right.”

“You okay, Cap?”

“Yeah. It's just really beautiful out here. I wish you could see it.”

“Well, when something inevitably goes wrong on our flight home, you can send me out to enjoy the scenery,” he says, a little tart, and it's the right thing to say, gets her thinking about the job again and not the view, which could entrance her for hours if she let it.

“I'll take you up on it,” she says, and sets to work.

Any lightheartedness is erased after the first twenty minutes of fiddly work, and she's there for more than two hours of increasing exhaustion as she tries not to look at her oxygen gauge or breathe too much, Benvolio's voice shockingly steady in her ear even as he gets hoarse with all the talking, passing on instructions with none of his usual commentary.

“They want us to test it,” he says after she's soldered yet another connection, and she blinks, surprised that there's an end in sight. “Come back to the airlock and hold on, I'm going to turn the thrusters on.”

“Right,” she says, and only then realizes how long it's been since she talked. “Hold on a second. Is it looking good from your end?”

“It's been looking good all day, which is the problem, but we have reached the end of NASA's tutorial, so we're going to give it a try.”

Rosaline pulls herself back in on her tether and shuts the airlock door, even if she doesn't cycle in air so she can come in, in case she has to go out again. Though at this point she should really refill her oxyen and get some sleep before she tries to do detail work again. “Ready,” she says when she realizes he's waiting for her, because he can't see her when he's in the cockpit.

“Testing thrusters,” he says, and Rosaline waits, her eyes closed, wishing she had her helmet off so she could hear the _Verona_ 's harmonics.

When they come on, she can feel the vibrations, and she starts laughing because she can't help it, after the day they've had. It takes her a minute to pull herself together, and he isn't trying to stop her, or tease her. He's just waiting. “Is that all of them?” she asks, because she has to.

“Seems to be, but you're the ship whisperer. Come on inside and tell me.”

“Yes. Please. Cycle the airlock,” she says, and spends the minute of the repressurization trying to get her heartrate under control.

As soon as the light goes green for taking off her suit, the door is opening, and there's Benvolio on the other side, his hair a mess because he always runs his hands through it when he's stressed, looking just as exhausted as she feels, arms out for a hug, and it feels completely natural to run into his arms and hold on and not, for the first time in several hours, think about all the terrible ways she could die in space.

“It is really hard to hug in this thing,” he says eventually, and Rosaline laughs and pulls away and takes that as her cue to start stripping out of her EVA suit. “NASA says sleep first, incident report can wait for morning, you've been awake way too long and we can adjust course tomorrow now that the thrusters are working.”

“That is the best fucking news I've heard all day,” says Rosaline, and when he grins at her the way he always does when she swears around him, she grins right back.

*

“I am so glad you are okay,” Juliet says in the video message she gets the next day, after sending her report and getting a flood of relief from Livia, Escalus, Isabella, and what seems like everyone else she's ever met. “I hate that I'm not up there with you, but Escalus told me how it all happened, and it sounds like you and Benvolio were a good team. Romeo and I are both so fucking relieved, and I am so glad we're giving a happy press conference today and not a sad one.” Her mouth quirks with the same impish smile from when they were kids. “And after all your talk about having to go on this mission with a Montague, I'm glad you two are getting to be friends.”

Friends. When Rosaline woke up, he'd gotten out her favorite breakfast from their variety of ration packs, cleaned, taken care of the maintenance chores they always argue over, and didn't make fun of her hair being a mess when she hadn't had time to take care of it at all before she fell asleep. That is a kind of friendship that goes beyond just being a responsible mission partner, and it's not fair to think otherwise.

In the spirit of being fair, Rosaline goes to find him. Today, he's playing Minesweeper. At least he's good at that, even if she questions his taste in shitty computer games to bring with them into space. “Thanks, for yesterday,” she says.

Benvolio frowns at her. “Thanks for _what_ , Capulet?”

“Being a good friend.”

“That's … thanks, Cap,” he says, and he looks a little lost, and blows up his mines on his next click. “Happy to do what I could.”

“You did a lot,” she says. “Now, want to play chess against a real partner, even if one you have about as much chance of beating as you do that computer?”

Benvolio laughs and takes on the challenge and beats her three games in a row before she concedes defeat, not minding too much considering she hasn't played since she learned in high school.

*

On day one hundred and three, halfway through the day, after one more course correction, Venus catches them, and there they are, in familiar and comforting orbit over a planet that doesn't look familiar or comforting at all.

“Mission control, we're here,” says Rosaline, and has to shut off her radio for a moment because she's crying, looking down at the roiling clouds.

Benvolio's eyes are already wide, taking in the patterns and currents, all the things he's going to be spending the next few days before their ideal window for leaving Venus's orbit opens up studying. Maybe it should be Juliet, but she can't resent him, when he's so happy, and when she's so happy. He loves this, and he deserves to be doing it, and his eyes are sheened with tears, and she kisses him before she realizes she's going to do it.

“Whoa,” says Benvolio when she pulls away. “That's a hell of a celebration.”

“Please don't be unbearable about this,” she says. “And if you say anything about Venus's mythological history, I can still throw you out that airlock and be the first murderer in space.”

“If I were going to do that I would have done it weeks ago, but—seriously, Cap?”

She gestures out the viewport at the clouds down below, not sure why it's her explanation but knowing that it is. “We're here, and we got each other here, and … maybe it's going to make the next three and a half months of this mission very awkward, but I trust us. I think we can get back to Earth safe anyway, and still be friends at the end of it.”

Benvolio doesn't kiss her, but he smiles so brightly that it's hard to misinterpret his opinion on it all, and he takes her hand before he goes back to looking at the clouds, drinking in the sight of something completely new. “Maybe something a little more than friends,” he says.

She holds on. “We've got a hundred and five more days of each other's company to figure that out. I think we can do it.”


End file.
